Amy Wright Glenn - Holding Space

Reviews for Holding Space

Holding Space does just that for each of us. In a clear, intimate voice, Amy Wright Glenn shares her own experience and wisdom and by doing so makes a space for her reader to develop the same. For anyone going through loss, this book will feel like a treasure.

SHARON SALZBERG, Lovingkindness and Real Love

This is a beautifully written book about the challenging practice of remaining presentholding non-reactive spacearound emotions of grief, sorrow and loss. This practice is brought alive through many touching vignettes from the authors life and work as a hospital chaplain and as a doula for the poignant transitions of birth and death. I recommend Holding Space highly for hospice workers, religious and medical professionals, and for anyone facing personal loss.

JAN CHOZEN BAYS, MD
Mindfulness on the Go and Mindful Eating

To be human is to be born, to live, and then to pass on. I have long believed that we do ourselves a great disservice by remaining insulated from the realities of birth and death. In this exceptional book, Amy Wright Glenn offers profound wisdom and support to help us navigate that most tender journey of death and dying. Holding Space is a beautiful contribution to finding peace in one of lifes most important passages.

SUSAN STIFFELMAN, Parenting with Presence

This is a beautiful, gracious book of earned wisdom from a writer who is gifted with the capacity to be present with a loving heart to lifes most essential moments, from birth to death. Highly recommended!

MIRIAM GREENSPAN, Healing Through the Dark Emotions

Amy Wright Glenn knows what it means to hold space in both sorrow and joy. This is essential reading for those choosing to follow their vocation to be with the dying and the dead with compassion, mindfulness, and presence.

LEE WEBSTER, President, National Home Funeral Alliance

In Holding Space Amy Wright Glenn delivers a thoughtful and poetic meditation on bringing mindful presence to the two major transition points in life: birth and death. Utilizing stories from her personal life and her experiences as a birth doula and a hospital chaplain, Amy reveals how we can keep our hearts open to both deep sorrow and ecstatic joy in these sacred thresholds. You will find wisdom, love, and tenderness on every page of this very special book.

HENRY FERSKO-WEISS, Cofounder and Executive Director of the International End of Life Doula Association, Caring for the Dying

Amy Wright Glenn offers a deeply personal account of her journey as a daughter, mother, chaplain and doula. It should be required reading for those involved in end-of-life care, grieving, and healing.

ALEXANDRE ROTTA, MD, Division Chief of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Childrens Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine

Many parents are uncertain how to talk to their children about death. Through personal stories and spiritual teachings, Amy Wright Glenn offers insight into the way death is a natural part of life. Her honest reflections remind us to hold space for children, elders and ourselves to be more fully present with one another.

REV. AMY FREEDMAN,
Unitarian Universalist Minister of Religious Education

A compassionate, wise, and insightful bookHolding Space will help you move through lifes challenges with courage, compassion, and the doulas skill of holding space by embracing all moments with love.

DEBRA PASCALI-BONARO, Founder of Orgasmic Birth

The wisdom this book contains makes it worthy of being a key reference on the subject. For those, like me, who keep in our personal libraries only books that have a timeless quality and which beg to be read again and again, this will be among them.

SUZANNE ARMS, Founder of Birthing the Future

Amy Wright Glenn dares to enter the holy space of birth and death simultaneously. She teaches us to hold not only our loved ones handsthose breathing and those who have crossed the threshold into deathbut to embrace love and fear together in our open hearts. Death is not a disease, Amy tells us. As a mother of a newborn who died in my arms, whose body I prepared for burial on my bed moments after birth, I agree.

DIANNA VAGIANOS ARMENTROUT,
Walking the Labyrinth of My Heart

Holding Space is a beautiful book. Amy Wright Glenn intertwines stories of her personal growth with meditations on moments of deep meaning. In doing so, she helps us all to hold space for our griefwhich is to say, she helps us to hold space for ourselves and for our loved ones. This book is full of insights, lessons, and kindness.

ELIZABETH HEINEMAN, Ghostbelly

Amy is a woman who has the courage to trust her intuition and open-minded relations to the world around her. Whether serving bereaved families or sharing the raucous joy of her sons antics, Amy is a young, fresh voice to carry the torch for all women; all explorers of humanity.

NINA ANGELA MCKISSOCK, RN, From Sun to Sun

No topic is more avoided than death. In this book, Amy Wright Glenn creates a safe space for the readers to both cognitively examine death as well as benefit from reading a trustworthy travel guide with regard to the experience of loss. Holding Space leaves the reader better equipped for whatever journey into loss awaits them.

BOB MATTINGLY, Executive Director of the Center for Spiritual and Ethical Education

This is an incredibly moving, honest and insightful book. Amy Wright Glenn skillfully and artfully offers tools and wisdom for those of us present with individuals at the most intimate, vulnerable and profound times in their lives.

ADITI SETHI-BROWN, MD, Hospice and Palliative Medicine

Holding Space is a book that everyone should read, for our collective conscience would be better off for it. There are people in life whose shoes youd like to walk in or whose head youd like to be in, yet Amy is one of the very few whose heart Id like to feel in.

TRACY CASSELS, PhD, Founder of Evolutionary Parenting

Parallax Press

P.O. Box 7355

Berkeley, CA 94707

parallax.org

Parallax Press is is the publishing division of Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism, Inc.

2017 Amy Wright Glenn

All rights reserved

Names and identifying details of those mentioned in doula and chaplaincy stories have been changed.

Ebook ISBN9781941529799

Cover and text design by Jess Morphew

Cover photograph Elle Moss / Arcangel Images

Interior Leaf Art Yuliya Koldovska / Shutterstock

Author photograph Connie Granja

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Glenn, Amy Wright, author.

Title: Holding space : on loving, dying, and letting go / Amy Wright Glenn.

Description: Berkeley, California : Parallax Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017023646 (print) | LCCN 2017039133

(ebook) | ISBN

9781941529799 | ISBN 9781941529782

Subjects: LCSH: DeathReligious aspects. | Loss (Psychology)Religious